Re: Current Downloadable Font Status....

Brad Chase wrote:

>If you can legally create a printed document with TrueDoc,
>you can legally create an electronic publication.

This is not at all necessarily true. A number of font developers' licenses
specifically disallow certain forms of electronic document embedding. The
Microsoft/Adobe EOT technology acknowledges this, and includes a font check
which looks for properties information in the font specifying whether a
given font may be embedded. So far, type designers and font companies have
seen very little concern for security in TrueDoc; indeed, we've seen very
little regard for our concerns at all!

As for 'best possible output quality', I've looked at both TrueDoc (or
FuzzyDoc as it is already known in the type community) and WEFT and am
infinitely more impressed by the output quality of the latter.

>It is true that TrueDoc may not generate output identical to the
>original font engine on the original authoring system. There are a
>number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that TrueDoc
>employs very advanced antialiasing, sub-pixel positioning, and edge
>filtering algorithms to ensure the best possible output quality on a
>variety of video displays. It is not due to any destruction of the
>integrity of the glyph shapes- indeed, in a non-pixelated world there
>would be no discernable difference.

This is the most egregious nonsense I've yet heard from those trying to flog
TrueDoc. TrueDoc output is unfaithful because it's so advanced? Give me a
break. How come fonts embedded with WEFT look the way they're supposed to?
Last I checked, Microsoft inhabited the same pixelated world as Bitstream.

John Hudson, Type Director

Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
www.tiro.com
tiro@tiro.com

Received on Thursday, 21 August 1997 18:50:51 UTC